The Question of Stuff

Francis Bacon’s stuff

I am helping my youngest to create a talk on something about which she is passionate (in her case, pony care). I have managed to persuade her to lead with manure-shovelling, as nothing hooks a child in better than mounds of stinky poo.

Speaking of which, I am doing some preliminary exploration into mulches for the garden. Here is what I will probably end up ordering but I would love to hear what you use? I love the idea of buying mulch to feed the soil; it feels so much better than buying most other things, which, eventually, one has to work out what to do with ‘in the end’. I don’t mean to be morbid about this, but coincidence means that I’ve been having a lot of conversations this week with people who are facing the fact that at some point all their STUFF will have to be dealt with.

And we all have a lot of stuff nowadays.

When I first got married I had so much stuff that my Rotter wasn’t allowed any stuff; there simply wasn’t room. He often tells people that he is only allowed one box of his own things, and that this box has to be in the basement. I’m not sure if this is totally true but I will concede that I may subliminally have chosen him because he was refreshingly free of baggage, both the physical and the emotional kind.

But back to twilight year conundrums…It seems to me that there are two ways to go with this; either you decide to do nothing, you hang tight, perhaps in a home with more rooms than you really use, and you enjoy all your things and the comfort of familiar surroundings until one day you are wheeled out of the front door and someone has to go through everything. This can be very therapeutic for those in grief, or it can be awful - depends on your constitution I think. This type of situation is, in some sense, a kindness to those who love you, because there is no change of pace, no sudden pivot to a different life. Downsizing, it seems, requires not just a monumental effort of will, but also for some, a complete character change.

I admire those who do it. The people who pare down everything and go and live somewhere smaller and ‘more manageable’. The manageable bit though is so often misunderstood to mean ‘easy to clean’ or ‘with fewer stairs’ when what is actually more manageable is the fact that the giant emotional hippo containing all the questions around the fate of all the ‘stuff’ has been removed.

How heavenly for example, to know where everything is, and to enjoy and love everything you own because there isn’t too much of it. Nothing in storage, nothing kept for a rainy day, no piles of papers, or old furniture waiting for your attention. You wear your best clothes every day because they’re the only clothes you own. You have donated, given away, digitised, compressed, edited and culled everything ruthlessly until the last small voice telling you that you must get around to fixing that piece of broken china, or that you need to sign a power of attorney has been silenced. That’s when a lot of this group of people actually start living. I think it’s fabulous, but probably quite unsettling at first to see someone shed an old familiar skin like that.

I am sentimental about a lot of my ‘stuff’; it holds memories. But I’m married to someone less bothered by this sort of nonsense and I’m glad of it. We all need a foil and by God he is mine. Perhaps he will turn me into a stuff-less person who travels the world and curates her belongings. I asked him last night what he thought we should do when the children leave and without blinking he said that he was going to take me to Space.

x Laetitia

Bulb things coming soon and pictures of the garden, and tool cleaning.